


oh, there is thunder in our hearts

by macaronidoodles



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series), Fantasy High
Genre: (mostly hurt tho), Angst, Animal Death, Blood and Injury, Character Study, F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:08:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macaronidoodles/pseuds/macaronidoodles
Summary: Really, she thinks, she should be used to this by now. Dying. Being torn apart from the inside out.(Kristen only has one spell slot. She makes a decision.)
Relationships: Kristen Applebees & Riz Gukgak, Kristen Applebees & The Bad Kids, Kristen Applebees/Tracker O'Shaughnessey
Comments: 34
Kudos: 170





	oh, there is thunder in our hearts

**Author's Note:**

> Whoo boy, Brennan is really killing me by having Kristen taking the brunt of the damage two eps in a row. Leave my girl alone dude!! 
> 
> Please heed the blood tw: there's a lot of it and it's not really possible to skip over, unfortunately. Animal death is not depicted in detail but featured heavily in the second scene break if you want to skip that. Vomit tw is minimal but begins with the line 'Really, she thinks, she should be used to this by now.' and ends after the scene break.
> 
> Title from 'Running Up That Hill' by Kate Bush, which is the most Kristen of songs.

Tracker’s gone, vanishing behind a cloud of ghostly, fluttering moths, and in front of them Kalina stands, grinning a sharp-toothed grin. Kristen won’t show it, will keep casually poking Kalina with questions and insults until she gives up something useful, but she’s absolutely _terrified_. Where is Tracker? Where are the others? What the fuck are they going to do now?

“Dreams are real here,” Kalina is saying, eyes alight with menace. “You know that, right? So, for example…”

She disappears from sight with that vague threat. Bullshit, Kristen thinks, but then Riz winces, tugging at his tie.

“Did that really just hurt you?” she asks, alarmed.

Riz nods, and then she feels it too. A scratch, not enough to draw blood, like those she’d get from her old family cat when she pet him too hard. Just a scratch, _except_ _it’s coming from inside her own head._

“Are you flirting with me?” Kristen shouts desperately to the air, trying out Fig’s old Goldenrod wind-up tactic. “She’s _fucking_ flirting with me!”

Kalina reappears, cool and collected. “No, Kristen, that’s funny,” she says, flicking her tail back and forth, and launches into her evil “I’m gonna kill you and your friends,” monologue that Kristen’s getting pretty tired of.

She says something she vaguely witty back about Kalina being the Nightmare King’s bitch (she’s distracted, okay, she’s not at her best), but Kalina just smiles and vanishes again. Kristen can feel her clawing at the inside of her skull. _Fuck_.

Riz starts looking around frantically for the pollen, but Kristen knows it’s too late. They’re being killed, slowly but surely, ripped apart by the disease that is Kalina, and they will long dead by the time the others return with the rest of the ingredients for the tincture. She can heal them, put off the inevitable for a bit longer, but there is only has one way to cure themselves now.

Kristen looks at Riz. She knows Riz, knows he’s made the same calculation she has, but he’s still fumbling through the undergrowth for the pollen. He will keep going to the very end, still searching on bloodied hands and knees for any chance at survival, to find the thing that will save the day, to solve the mystery. She thinks about how happy he was yesterday after seeing his dad, how he told them, shyly, he really liked them too, how he had the same look on his face then as he does when he’s clue hunting or researching with Adaine.

They can’t lose him again. And if anyone can solve this, Riz can.

Kristen only has one spell slot. She makes a decision.

*******

Kristen in nine years old, and her cat is dead.

“Moooooom!” she wails, coming into the kitchen cradling the small body, which she's wrapped in her _Helio Rocks!_ summer camp sweater.

“What’s wrong, sweetie?” her mother asks, distractedly. She’s trying to fold laundry and feed baby Cork at the same time, and doesn’t look up at Kristen when she enters.

Through her tears, Kristen feels a sting of resentment. Her mom is always too busy to listen to her, she thinks, and then swallows the thought guiltily. Pastor Amelia said was sinful the last time she went to confession.

“Cornbread’s dead,” she says tearily, laying the body down on the kitchen table.

“Oh, no, Kristen, not on the table,” her mom sighs, but puts the laundry down and leaves Cork in his high chair to come over. “I’m so sorry, sweetie, what happened?”

“He got- he got- hit by a caaaar,” Kristen cries louder, verging on hysteria. “And now, he’s _dead_.”

“Oh, Kristen,” her mom says, wrapping her a big hug.

Kristen sobs into her mom’s chest, her mom murmuring comforting words into her ear and rubbing her back until she begins to calm down a little.

“I tried to save him, Mom, I prayed really hard, but I couldn’t fix him,” she sniffs. She had; after she saw the car squealing away around the corners – “Heathens,” her mom says when she tells her that part – she’d gone and prayed over Cornbread’s sad squashed body. There had been something there, she thought, something that was warm and smelled like popcorn. It happens sometimes when she’s praying, she’s not sure why, but it hadn’t be enough.

“I know, sweetheart,” her mom says, patting her back. “It was a good thing to do. You do Helio proud.”

Kristen nods. She's done something good, at least. It will make up for her bad thoughts.

Her mom goes over to the table and picks up the body, still wrapped in Kristen’s sweater. “Oh, I’m never gonna get the blood out of this,” she sighs, and Kristen feels another wave of guilt surge through her.

“Sorry,” she mumbles.

“It’s okay,” her mom says, opening the back door and depositing Cornbread – not carefully enough, in Kristen’s opinion – next to the trash. “We can bury him in the backyard when Dad gets home. We’ll have a funeral for him, how does that sound? We can sing your favourite hymns and pray, so Helio knows he’s meant for heaven.”

“Okay,” Kristen says, wiping the tears from her face. “Mom?”

“Yeah, sweetie?”

“Why… why didn’t Helio stop this from happening?” she asks. “Why didn’t he save Cornbread? He didn’t do anything wrong.”

Her mother’s face darkens. “Kristen, don’t ask things like that,” she snaps, and is about to say something else when she’s interrupted by bleeping from the baby monitor crystal next to the microwave. “Agh, Bucky and Bricker just woke up from their nap. Can you keep an eye on Cork for me?”

“Yeah,” Kristen says quickly, trying to make up for whatever it was she’d said that had made her mom angry. She’s supposed to be good and kind and loving: she’s not supposed to upset people.

“Good girl,” her mom says, giving her a quick kiss on the head before dashing upstairs.

Kristen goes over to Cork and pokes him in the face. “Do you know why this happened?” she says.

He babbles happily in response and grabs at her hair, smearing mushy peas into one of her plaits. She sighs, picks up the spoon to begin feeding him again, and tries to put the questions out of her mind.

She can’t, though. The questions marks hook into the back of her brain like claws: _why, why, why_? _And why can’t I talk about it?_

Later, after they've buried Cornbread and she’s supposed to be sleeping, Kristen sneaks out of her room to borrow – not steal, she silently promises Helio, borrow – her parent’s copy of the Corn Bible. She has her own, several, actually, but they’re the _for kids_ versions. She wants the real deal.

Under the covers, she opens the book and begins to read. There’s that feeling again, like the sun is shining in her chest, like something is growing there. It feels like a good sign. There must be answers to her questions in here, right?

Right?

*******

"Kristen,” Riz says, eyes wide, “What did you _do_?”

The glow of divine light fades from her hands, and she’s about to reply when Kalina attacks again, more intensely this time, like she’s using two hand – paws? – instead of one. Kristen gasps and doubles over in pain as she feels the claws scrape their way down the inside of her abdomen. This is somehow so much worse than yesterday when Daybreak had slashed into her over and over and almost killed her. At least she’d been able to see that coming. 

She looks back up at Riz, who’s still watching her with shock. “You need,” she says, through bloody, gritted teeth, “To find Tracker.”

*******

It’s Kristen’s first day of high school. She’s died, met God, and been resurrected, all in the space of about a minute.

She’s not an expert, but this does not seem to be a Normal Teen Experience.

Her parents meet her outside of the school, her brothers unusually subdued in the back of the car.

“You okay, kiddo?” her dad says, as he and her mom pull her into a big hug.

“Yeah, I think so,” Kristen says. She can feel the questions piling up in the back of her head again, and so she speaks slowly, trying to process them all. “I, uh, went to heaven. I think. I met Helio.”

“You met _Helio?_ ” her mum says, suddenly excited. “Oh, we gotta tell Pastor Amelia!”

“Yeah, um,” Kristen says, frowning. “Actually, can we stop at the bookstore on the way home? I think I need to get some books. On other religions.”

Her parents’ warmth vanishes suddenly, like a cloud passing in front of the sun. “Get in the back of the car,” her dad says, stony-faced, and stalks over to the driver’s side.

“Okay, okay,” Kristen says, heart hammering faster than it had done when she’d seen the corn monster, and scrambles into the back of the car as quickly as possible.

The journey home passes in silence. Kristen leans her head against the window, her staff across her lap, and tries to quiet the questions. Nothing seems to work: this train of thought feels less like it’s serenely passing by on far away tracks and more like it's running her over headfirst. Repeatedly. Now it’s not just the _why do people suffer_ thing that’s been going on for a while in the background whilst she’s praying or sitting in the back of one of the marathon Harvestmen conferences, but a whole host of others too, each screaming for attention, an answer. Like: why didn’t Helio answer her question? Does he not know either? Why is he a _frat bro_?

Is he even worthy of worship?

Kristen goes straight to her room as soon as they get home, saying she’s not feeling well. It’s not technically a lie, since she’s exhausted and, you know, she died today, but it’s mostly an excuse to get away from her parent’s pointed silence. She’ll have to do extra prayers or something tomorrow to make up for it, probably, but right now she needs some space to think.

She sits on her bed and pulls out her bible, which is still covered in creamed corn and a little bit of blood. She wipes it off as she best she can with tissues, making a mental note to ask the nice wizard girl who killed the lunch lady if she can cast prestidigitation on it tomorrow, and gingerly flicks through the sticky pages. This copy was her twelfth birthday present after she cast her first cleric spell, and she’s made little notes on some of the pages (in pencil, of course, so she can rub them out if she needs to) that she looks through now, hoping for some semblance of an answer. She comes up short and shuts it in frustration.

If her parents won’t take her to the bookstore, she’ll look in the library at school for different books. For answers. Maybe she’ll find them there, outside of the Bible and the Church.

This is sacrilege or blasphemy most likely, but at this moment, Kristen can’t bring herself to care.

Her mind is still racing a mile a minute, but again, she did die today, and her body is screaming for release. She climbs under the covers, the questions still circling, and lets them chase her to unconsciousness.

When she does fall asleep, she dreams she is drowning in them.

*******

Around them the forest echoes with sinister laughter. Riz, one hand placed protectively on Kristen’s shoulder, draws his arquebus.

“What the _fuck_ ,” he whispers, as a crowned skull appears before both of them, and points his gun.

“Riz, don’t,” Kristen says, too late, as there’s a bang and a flash. He misses, of course, because the Nightmare King isn’t actually there. The skull disappears with a loud chuckle.

Riz hisses in frustration and holsters his weapon. 

“I’m gonna keep looking for the pollen,” he says, determined, and darts off.

“No, Riz, you need to get Tracker!” Kristen says.

“I can do both!” Riz yells over his shoulder, picking around the edges of the stagnant water and out of her sight.

Blood begins to drip down her face as the invisible claws break through her skin. She swears and casts a healing spell on herself, feeling her cheeks grow hot as the wounds close up.

Kalina appears again. “Looks like you’re alone now, Kristen. You feeling scared yet?”

“Fuck you,” she spits, unable to come out with anything better.

Kalina raises an eyebrow. “Oh, seems like you are. You feel it, don’t you? You’re going to die, slowly, and painfully, and alone. Just little old me for company.”

“At least I won’t have to listen to you talking anymore,” Kristen says, frustrated. “Do you _ever_ shut up?”

“You don’t want to talk, Kristen?” Kalina says, all faux concern. “We don’t have to talk. I have better things to do, anyway.”

She vanishes once more, and Kristen feels scratching at her freshly-healed cuts. She groans and begins to cast another healing spell.

*******

Kristen is fourteen years old. She’s at a club, drinking water with a lime in it to look like vodka, and a girl has just kissed her. Like, on the lips.

“AAH!” she says, panicked, and clamps her hand over her mouth. “I, uh, I don’t kiss, actually! So!”

“I’m so sorry,” Tracker says, looking mortified. “I thought – I made a mistake. I’m sorry.”

This close to her face Kristen can see every one of the hairs between her eyebrows, every eyelash. She’s pretty.

(Her brain explodes with questions: Why is she noticing that? Why did she like that? Is that what kissing boys feels like? Is she _gay_?

Oh Helio, what will her parents say?)

“Uh,” Kristen says, articulately, before the bass drops and Tracker _snarls_ , transforming into a… werewolf? When she looks around, she realises Tracker’s not the only one, and now she’s surrounded by vampires and werewolves, and there are sounds of fighting from the next room. _Shoot_.

It’s a long fight, and she almost dies again, and then they spend all night doing drugs with Fabian’s dad and all day training with him, so it’s not until the next evening after coming home and being yelled at by her parents that Kristen has a chance to process that.

She kissed a girl. She kissed a girl. And she wants to do it again.

She’s _so_ going to hell.

On her crystal, with incognito mode on (she’s not a total idiot), Kristen fantasy-googles _how to tell if you’re gay_ and then takes the first five quizzes that come up.

They all pretty much say the same thing.

Kristen closes the tab and clears her search history just to be on the safe side, as if by deleting the evidence she can pretend that it never existed, and tells herself never to speak of this again. She can be straight, she thinks, she can believe in Helio, she can still be the person her parents want her to be. She can do it if she just _tries_. 

And she does try, she is trying, but all of the questions seem to bubble up and spill out of her without her noticing. She’s gotten pretty good at keeping it bottled up at home, but whenever she’s not there they burst out of her without any warning. She asks different questions to the school librarian, the receptionist at the gift shop at the hospital when they visit Biz, Basrar, Gorthalax, the other Bad Kids, Coach Daybreak, anyone. None of it’s super helpful, and her conversation with Coach Daybreak, in particular, is horrifying _(you’re going to hell_ echoes in her head for the whole rest of the day), but she still keeps asking.

After it turns out Daybreak is evil and they kill him she still doesn’t feel closer to any answers. She doesn't believe in Helio anymore, doesn't know if she believes in anything, and she feels more lost than ever.

The day after her house is raided, her parents sit her down. They’re angry, but so what, she’s angry too because Daybreak literally tried to kill her and they still won’t _listen_. “You know what,” she says, cutting her off her dad’s blustering excuses. “All I wanted was answers. I’m your _kid_. I should be able to get answers from you.”

She casts _Light_ on her _On the Subject of World Religions_ book and shoves it in front of them. “This is giving me answers, at least!”

Her parents freak out, and grab their weapons. “Get that out of our house!” her dad yells, and they both brandish their poleaxes at her.

“Fine,” she says, and walks out, slamming the door behind her. Her heart is beating hard, and she knows the panic will set in soon, but for now she feels good and strong, filled with righteous rage. She finally has an answer to the question behind all the other questions: _do her parents love her? Do they love her enough to accept her for who she is?_

No. No, and it’s heart-breaking and horrible and she’s gonna cry about it later, but it’s true.

At least she knows some people who do.

(When she drunkenly tells Fig and Adaine and Riz that she likes girls a few months later, their response is pretty much _Yeah, duh._ She wakes up the next morning with a terrible headache and Fig’s arm wrapped around her, Adaine trancing across from them.

For the first time in a long time, she feels that feeling: warmth and sunshine, and something new, something strong, taking root in her chest.)

*******

Kristen sinks to the ground, woozy from blood loss and exhausted with the effort of continued spell casting. She is a mess of blood and half-healed wounds and scar tissue, and still Kalina scratches at the back of her head.

Memories swirl around her addled mind, from when she was a little kid, from freshman year, that awful night when she was kicked out of her parent’s house, threatening to break her focus. If she didn’t know better she’d blame it on Kalina, but she knows that the Shadowcat can’t actually read her thoughts. Probably the blood loss, or Kalina clawing at her brain. Or it’s just _her_ , how she’s always been, her mind never able to let itself rest.

Really, she thinks, she should be used to this by now. Dying. Being torn apart from the inside out.

She’s midway through casting another heal on herself when she has to pause to throw up. It’s streaked with red, and the back of her throat stings with acid. _Not good._

She spits blood, wipes her mouth, and keeps going.

*******

Kristen is fifteen and she’s at prom. She’s dead again, and so is God, apparently, and now she’s talking to the Universe.

(This is _for sure_ not a Normal Teen Experience.)

“You are the instrument through which the universe cares,” the voice says, soft and warm like a hug. “If you choose to care, the universe cares. If you don’t, it doesn’t.”

“Cool,” Kristen says, voice small. “I care.”

In this moment her brain is, finally, still.

She forges herself a new god, and tumbles back down to the world of the living, and finds that her conviction fades in the face of the real world. _Is this really what I want?_ , she thinks as her spirit guardians buzz annoyingly around her. _Do I believe in this?_ But they have to fight a dragon and then they _win_ and they’re caught up in celebrations, and Kristen is really, really happy for the first time in a long time. This can wait, she thinks. This can wait.

In sophomore year, things are better in some ways and worse in others. She has a girlfriend but no parents, a new god and church, the same doubts and questions. YES! Becomes YES? Becomes _I don’t know, I don’t know, my doubts have doubts and I still have more questions than answers._

In her dreams, she tries to capture the face of someone she knows on paper, but she can’t remember what they look like. She rips the page up in frustration.

Fuck it, she thinks, maybe radical doubt can be her thing. Maybe nothing is true and nothing is real and nothing matters, maybe there are only questions and never any answers.

She tries it, over spring break. Their adventure seems to be one long crisis after another, both of faith and of actual legitimate danger and heartbreak. She argues with Tracker and watches Fabian fall and falls herself, hundreds of feet out of a tower trying to rescue Adaine, and through it all she tries to be cool and uncaring and detached. Nothing matters, right? Why should she try?

It’s exhausting.

She makes up with Tracker, ties her hit-points to Fabian when they fight in Leviathan to protect him, heals her broken ankle and hobbles after Adaine’s dad. Doubt isn’t working. Doubt won’t protect her friends. She needs something new.

And Kristen wants to believe in something again. She wants something, someone, to trust with her thoughts and her feelings and her questions. She wants to care.

One afternoon whilst time is stopped and the sun is frozen high in the sky, she leaves Tracker and Ragh arm wrestling and goes down to the shrine of the unnamed goddess with a paper and pen, to see if she can make a drawing to show Tracker. She’s sketching idly when the philosophy student spirit guardians that she’s had for a while show up. They start buzzing with their typical blasé bullshit, _it’s an interesting academic exercise I suppose, but really – nothing ever really works, that’s the point-_

Kristen has had enough of it. “You guys are all just talking in, like, a big chamber,” she says. “I want to have kids someday. I want to be a good friend to my friends. I think – in the everyday minutiae of my life, I need more answers than everything’s wrong, and everything’s broken.”

The guardians dissipate. She feels the tensions she’s been carrying for all of spring break – for before that, for all of sophomore year, maybe ever since she woke up in her body on the cold floor of the gymnasium to a dragon and the same old problems – release along with them.

She finishes the drawing of the unnamed goddess. It’s been a while since she’s drawn something, so it’s not that good, but she’s really, really proud of it.

“Thank you,” she says, to the empty air.

There is no reply, but Kristen decides she doesn’t need one. She believes.

*******

She’s almost out of higher level spells, and there’s still no sign of Riz or Tracker or the others. She’s getting cold and shaky, which she knows is a bad sign. Healing magic mends wounds but it can’t really help with shock.

Kristen prepares another spell anyway, but before she can cast it Kalina rakes a claw across her neck and slices into her trachea in two. She chokes, panicking, as blood bubbles at the back of her throat and into her mouth, making it hard for her to breath. Black spots float in front of her eyes until she leans over and coughs up the worst of it, but when she tries to speak the words of the spell nothing comes out.

No speaking means no more verbal component means no more healing. This is it. Kristen is dying. 

In a haze, Kristen lies down on the cool forest floor, curled up into herself. She has nothing else to do but think, let the questions overtake her, as she is slowly torn to shreds.

Where will she go now?

 _Scratch_.

To the tree in Arborley like yesterday? To heaven with Riz’s dad and the angelic secret agents?

 _Scratch_.

Will she come back this time?

 _Scratch_.

In the back of her mind, she hears a whisper: _You are the instrument through which the universe cares._

What does she care about?

_Scratch._

Her younger brothers, who she’s not seen in months, maybe won't ever see again, and who she misses so much it makes her chest tight.

_Scratch._

Tracker, of course, lost and scared in the woods somewhere. But also Jawbone and Sandralynn and Ragh. Gilear, even. She cares about them all, about the home they’re making together, a family made of something stronger than blood.

_Scratch._

And her friends. Gods, her friends, chaotic and wonderful and full of love. She’s seen them do impossible things, come back from impossible things, crazy, stupid things. They’re the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

Suddenly, she’s not scared anymore, or she is, but it’s okay. It’s the same thing she felt when she cast _Greater Restoration_ on Riz a few minutes and half a lifetime ago, the easiest decision she’s ever made.

Kristen believes in her friends. They’re gonna save Tracker, and they’re gonna save her.

Something falls into place as the thought crosses her mind, like the seeds that were sown in her chest in detention on an autumn day a year and a half ago, which have been slowly growing around her ribs ever since, have blossomed at last.

Her eyes are scrunched closed in pain, so she doesn’t see it, but there is a sudden burst of light around her as if, impossibly, a spell has been cast.

Around Kristen, floating spectral figures, glowing with golden light, appear one by one: Adaine, mid-spell, orb held aloft; Fig, striking a chord on her bass guitar; Fabian, brandishing his sword in one hand and his blanket in the other; Riz, searching through his briefcase, gun over one shoulder; and Gorgug, standing over her, axe raised to protect her from attack. Her friends, her guardians.

There's crashing in the undergrowth, getting closer. The Bad Kids are on their way. Until then, their ethereal counterparts keep silent vigil, and when Kristen falls into unconsciousness her expression is serene.

She believes.

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2am where I am and I don't know if this even makes sense anymore lol but here we are!
> 
> I love Kristen and I want her to be safe and loved and be able to process all of her trauma! There's so much of her backstory we haven't had a chance to unpack in canon. I got a bit carried away and tried to do it here lmao.
> 
> Also I 100% believe that her new religion should just be Loving Her Friends and Gay Power. The found family vibes of it all... @Brennan validate me plz
> 
> Comments and kudos appreciated! Catch me being in my feelings about Kristen on tumblr @aydaofleviathan


End file.
